Taxonomy and the Animal Kingdom: Arthropods- Part Three

After repeated trips to the garden to hunt for arthropods in the leaf litter and our visit from the University of Colorado "Bug Mobile," the students have been very interested in the independent classroom works about Arthropods.

Sorting Arthropods into Insects and Arachnids has become very popular; this work is a combination of conceptual sorting and a basic math work. It requires the child to count the legs and body parts of the arthropod and use this information to sort them based upon their taxonomic description (insects have six legs and three body parts, arachnids have eight legs and two body parts)- a pretty high level cognitive operation for these two and three year olds!

Children also enjoy the larger work of sorting Arthropod three part cards into their taxonomic classes (some children have also experimented with their own classification schemes- including arthropods that bite people and arthropods that do not! An important consideration, I agree!).

The children also enjoy trying to identify the hidden Arthropods in camouflage cards (and often play games outside in which they try to hide arthropods cut out of construction paper from their classmates by applying the concept of camouflage).

The children love learning the nomenclature associated with the metamorphosis of arthropods.

And, of course, for the children who have acquired the motor control needed for handwriting, there are lots of opportunities for copy writing (coping text for handwriting practice).

These works are examples of the ways in which Montessori cultural units begin by providing the child with a concrete sensory experience and then permit them to actively construct meaning around the information they have been presented with (rather than passively memorizing facts); additionally, these cultural units reinforce and inter-relate with the traditional Montessori materials by providing additional motives (more practice and repetition) for the child to engage in math, language, and handwriting tasks.

The Geometric Solids

In Montessori classrooms the children are permitted to freely choose among a great variety of growth-promoting materials during the independent work period. As a result of their freedom to choose, it is always very interesting to see which materials the children are most interested in using (which can vary dramatically from year to year). Often, children will observe another student using a material and will want to imitate their use of it.

This year, I have been particularly struck by how interested the children are in learning the geometric forms. Even the youngest children in the classroom can already correctly identify the basic geometric forms (cube, cone, sphere, cylinder, and pyramid).

One of the most frequently selected lessons is to select some of the geometric forms, place them in a basket, cover them with a blanket and play a game in which they try to find a specific form with their eyes closed. This game is great for teaching children the names of the forms, both because there is a lot of repetition of the names ("Find the cube." "It is the cube!") and because it coordinates the child's visual and kinaesthetic memory (by combining the visual input of what you see with the motor output of what you feel more areas of the brain are active and the transmission of signals in the brain becomes more efficient, psychologists call this consolidation).

This multi-sensory approach is representative of the Montessori Method for learning, which considers children to be sensorial explorers who learn best using concrete materials that appeal to multiple sensory modalities. It is also a good example of the socialization that is fostered in the Montessori classroom-children enjoy using the materials independently as well as in spontaneously formed groups.

I really hope that years from now the children find learning geometry to be equally fun!

Some of the children enjoy doing the lesson while blindfolded and exclaiming "Ta Da"...

Cutting with Scissors

I also updated my cutting lesson with this nice little set (I really like the little wooden box for the scraps and the nice rounded stainless scissors- they seem better proportioned to the child's hand and the children were much more successful with them than they are with Fiskars).

Cutting with scissors is a very difficult task for young children. In Montessori classrooms, they cut strips of paper with progressively more difficult patterns of lines (moving from straight vertical cuts toward wavy lines which require them to turn the paper as they cut).